Top 4 Android Apps for Identifying Music

How many times have you heard a song being played and wanted to know the song name and artist so you can listen to it again but couldn’t? It has happened to most of us music enthusiasts in the past, but no more with the many audio recognition services out there to help you discover great tunes and share them with friends.

If you’re an Android user, there are quite a lot of apps which promise to fulfill this need, but how many of them are any good? I have tested a number of them and ranked the four that worked best for me.

1. Shazam

Shazam is a very popular application on the Google Play Store for this purpose, and it works just fine in my experience. Identifying music is a breeze with this app, and its solid integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Whatsapp, and more makes it easy for you to share new discoveries with friends. Once it identifies a song for you, it’ll show information about the the song’s release date, album and artist. It’ll even show you the bio and other popular tracks from the artist just in case you want more.

Price: Free / $5.99

2. SoundHound

SoundHound has been the main competition for Shazam and it’s not hard to see why. Its music discovery is excellent although not quite as fast as Shazam for me, which is why I have placed it second on this list. Still, it bags a high 4.3 average rating on the Google Play Store which means most of its users are satisfied, and chances are that you will be, too. Aside from the song and artist name, you also get to see videos of the song and even the most recent tweet of the artist with this app. Your search history is saved so you can see which songs you’ve identified in the past.

Price: Free / $5.99

3. TrackID

TrackID is a music discovery application from Sony with a 4.3 average rating, the same as SoundHound. Using it is pretty easy; just click the purple TrackID button when your device is near the music source, and it’ll attempt to identify it for you. Once it recognizes a song, it’ll allow you to download the songs or listen to them on Spotify if it is available in your region. It even has an offline mode that can capture songs for you and identifies them later when you have an Internet connection.

Price: Free

4. MusiXmatch

MusiXMatch is another widely used application, although it’s primarily known for its wide collection of lyrics and matching songs with their lyrics. However, it comes with a Music ID feature which listens to nearby music and identifies it for you, although it didn’t work quite as well as Shazam and SoundHound for me. When it does recognize a song, it will match the song with its appropirate lyrics so you can sing along.

Price: Free

Verdict

Of the four applications, Shazam worked best and fastest for me, while SoundHound was generally slower to recognise songs. As for TrackID, I had to click the retry button a couple of times before it would recognise the song (and sometimes it didn’t). MusiXmatch only recognised popular songs, but I did like its fairly accurate lyrics-matching feature.

Over to you! Tell us in the comments section which of the listed applications worked best for you or if you have any other app recommendations for music discovery on Android.

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